The Fictional and the Real World…

Past is always enchanting and, there is nothing wrong in wishing for the good old days to be back in my life, once again! Sipping a cup of tea, sitting in the verandah when the morning mist seems to have engulfed the surrounding, a travel back to some good memories. It was a pure bliss, not much long ago, to sit out and read something. Both of us would be sitting with something or other in hand to read. No one would even talk to each other except if it was something worth sharing.

When a little tired of reading, I would make a polite request to my little one to get for me another cup of tea, which she would consider as an order and would go to the kitchen ruing about her being used as a helping hand. Once again we both would immerse in worlds of our own, worlds that would come alive from the pages of the books. It was wonderful.

I wonder why I am thinking about that old days’ charm today, is it that I was always an escapist and found solace in the fictional world where the characters don’t come out of the pages to argue and say only what the author has made them to say. But the real life is so different from the fictional world where what you do and say depend upon the circumstances and not on pre-rehearsed situations. Perhaps herein lies the excitement of living not only a new day everyday but every moment as well.

The line between the fictional and the real world may seem to be very thin but it can by no means be called a boundary easily to be ignored. It is just like a glass wall dividing the real from the fictional world. When you are immersed in the fictional world and start thinking it to be real, it is the biggest folly of your life as when you try to come to the real life, believing how easy it is to come to the other side, you find a big barricade. A barricade, invisible to the naked eyes but strong enough to restrict any movement.

A study on the learning behaviour of two schools of fish would be a better way to explain what I have I mind. In an aquarium a thin glass partition was put which restricted the movement of fish from one area to another as whenever they would try, they would hit a glass partition that they were not able to see. Gradually over a period of time they were happy enough to remain in the part assigned to them. Even when the partition was removed, after some period, they still preferred to remain in the part allotted to them, making NO effort at all to move to the other part. Incredible it may seem but true it is.

It is this thin wall that I am talking of that separates the real from the fictional. If we want to seclude ourselves to just one part throughout our life, we have to impose a restriction in the very initial stages of development of the personality otherwise it is better to make a free movement between both the worlds—fictional as well as the real.

But the adage that you cannot have the best of both the worlds would make you crave for what you have not!